AbCellera and Harbour Antibodies, a Harbour BioMed subsidiary, enter into an agreement to combine AbCellera’s single-cell antibody discovery capabilities with Harbour’s H2L2 transgenic mouse platform to create a solution that enables the generation of large panels of fully-human therapeutic antibodies with unmatched speed, quality and efficiency. This will eliminate the need for antibody humanization, and benefits from AbCellera’s full suite of antibody discovery capabilities, spanning antigen design and immunization through to discovery, characterization, and lead selection.
“AbCellera’s platform unlocks the power of humanized rodents. It enables rapid and stringent screening of human antibody repertoires at more than 100-fold greater depth than hybridoma. This allows us to rapidly produce hundreds of high-quality human antibodies leads that have benefited from natural selection and maturation in vivo, maximizing the chance of good developability and low immunogenicity,” comments Carl Hansen, CEO & president of AbCellera. “This agreement aligns with our strategy of working with others to create value and reinforces our commitment to enabling partners with flexible solutions that integrate industry-leading innovation.”
The power of combining both platforms has been demonstrated in studies that have identified thousands of antigen-specific antibodies, from which hundreds of unique human antibodies were selected for desirable characteristics using stringent single-cell screening assays.
“H2L2 Mice have been widely used by over thirty companies and academic centers for discovering high-quality therapeutic antibodies with superior affinity and development properties,” says Dr. Jingsong Wang, CEO of Harbour Biomed. “Two antibody drug candidates have entered into clinical stage development in the past twelve months, both derived from our H2L2 transgenic platform. We are pleased to partner with AbCellera, a company with industry-leading proprietary technologies to accelerate the antibody discovery process for pharma and biotech companies.”
The H2L2 transgenic mice express carefully selected human immunoglobulin genes most suitable for therapeutic use, delivering robust and diverse human antibodies against therapeutic targets. AbCellera’s technology enables ultra-deep screening of the H2L2 immune repertoire to discover fully human antibodies from millions of single antibody-secreting cells per run, including plasma cells and memory B cells. The British Columbia-based company’s platform supports a wide array of single-cell antibody selection assays, combining multi-step and multiplexed binding measurements and live-cell assays. The combination of speed, screening depth, and greater specificity renders to successful discovery against any target class, including difficult targets such as membrane proteins, GPCRs, and ion channels.
Beyond its core microfluidic screening technology, AbCellera integrates expertise in animal immunizations for any species, assay design, bioinformatic analysis using a proprietary suite of software and visualization tools, and antibody characterization for developability and engineering.
